“(Archives) let us discover for ourselves who we are, why we are and what we are doing here, and then hopefully help us chart a path forward,” city archivist Jeff O’Brien says.
The Saskatoon city archives will be moving to a permanent location across from city hall.
Global News’ Gates Guarin sat down with O’Brien to take a walk down memory lane before everything is packed away for the move.
“Finding a home for the archives has been on my to-do list since I started in 1997. So finally I get to check that off,” O’Brien said.
He explained that the archives have had a few homes over the years. Back in 1978 historians convinced the city to loan its records to the provincial archives, which resulted in a contract for the provincial archives to manage the city’s records until 1992.
Records were then repatriated, he said, and kept at a city-owned warehouse until 2010, when they were moved to the current Cardinal Crescent location.
“This was always supposed to be temporary.”
O’Brien said their current location is at capacity, and they’ve had to shift records throughout the building for more storage.
He explained that records need to be kept at cooler temperatures to preserve them.
“(Room temperature is) not good for paper records, not good for photographs or film, or anything that’s a hard copy.”
O’Brien showed off some old city ledgers, saying before Excel spreadsheets everything like tax calculations needed to be recorded in these large ledgers. Before the move they’ll go through the ledger books to see if they need to keep them, he said, as they don’t want to move things if they don’t have to.
“The problem with throwing stuff out, once it’s gone, it’s gone.”
He also showed off fire insurance maps of the city, which were physical records that allowed fire insurers to set up fire insurance rates.
These maps held information about what each building was made out of and how tall they were, and allowed insurers to assess fire risks. He said in situations where information needed to be updated on a building, they would draw it out on a small piece of paper and paste it on top.
O’Brien said these are very delicate records and aren’t typically available to the public, but they do have digital copies online.
“They’re works of art, and they’re also the works of somebody. Some engineer, some surveyor’s life went into doing all this kind of thing.”
One of the other items O’Brien pulled out was a 16 mm film projector.
“The thing about obsolete formats is if you’ve got them you have to have the machinery to read them.”
He spoke about how at one point the film projector broke and he had to go through a school division to get connected with a retired technician who could repair it.
O’Brien said they have VHS tapes at the archives as well as cassette tapes, which he said he is gradually digitizing.
Archives allow you to revisit the past in a way that wouldn’t be possible if these archives didn’t exist, he said.
He said the new location will open up space for more researchers, more educational work with schools, more collaboration with city staff, and simply be more accessible.
“The point of the archives is to be used. The point of the archives is to support the functions of the city government and also the public.”
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